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Decline of the Roman Empire
The '''Decline of the Roman' lasted from about 363 AD until 453 AD. It began with the end of the Constantinian Dynasty which ushered in troubled time for Rome. It then ended when a Germanic general deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, had himself proclaimed king in the barbarian fashion. The causes of the decline and collapse of the western half of Roman Empire were complex. There were in fact a synergy of interacting tensions; political, economic, military, and social. After the dynasty established by Constantine the Great, the east-west division of the empire became firmly entrenched as the permanent form of imperial administration. Both the Eastern and Western Empire endured civil wars and a series of emperors ranging from moderately capable to completely inept, with only Theodosius (347-395 AD) standing out as exceptional. Nevertheless, the tensions were felt disproportionately in the West. In the East, once a lasting peace was finally established with Sassanid Persia in 387 AD, a huge stretch of territory stretching from Anatolia to Egypt became the economic engine of the Eastern Empire, well shielded from intruders. In the West, only Hispania remained for a time largely free from invaders, at least until 405 AD. This economic strength in the East, in turn allowed the bureaucracy to remain intact much better, providing a route for advancement of capable men; it would eventually become the justifiably famous Byzantine bureaucracy. Thus even under inept eastern emperors, their subordinates were very effective and the government worked well. Of course the ultimate trigger for the collapse of the Western Empire was the rise of the Huns, because of both the invasions of Attila and the displacement of other Germanic tribes. While the East could usually buy-off these barbarians with tribute, the West could not, and at the same time had simply too many troubled borders: the long Rhine and upper Danube frontiers; Pict raiders and Saxon pirates plaguing Britannia; and in north-western Africa the persistent nuisance of the Moors. For all these challenges, perhaps the social factors were ultimately crucial. One genius of the Roman Empire had always been its ability to incorporate new peoples into her ethnically diverse empire without being weighed-down by prejudice. This was until it came to the Germanic peoples. In her declining years, almost all the most capable leaders (Stilicho, Aetius, and Ricimer) were of Germanic descent. However, unlike the provincial Illyria emperors who dragged the Roman Empire out of the Crisis of the 3rd-Century, these Germans were consistently denied access to real political power. Some historians have also pointed to Christianity as another divisive force, albeit a minor one. It is true that the Church pursued the persecution of pagans with the same zeal with which they had once been persecuted themselves, at a time when the empire needed unity. In 476 AD, the last western emperor Romulus Augustulus was overthrown by a Germanic general, who collected-up the imperial regalia, and sent it to the eastern emperor to signify that there was no longer any need for a western emperor. Nevertheless, the Roman Empire would endure for centuries in the east, even if European historians prefer to refer to it as the Byzantine Empire. Western Europeans were intensely proud of their own heritage from the Greco-Roman world, that came to them via the so-called Barbarian Kingdoms and the Muslim world. History Valens and Valentinian (364-375 AD) After the death of Julian, a large Roman army was still left deep in Sassanid Persian territory. Jovian, an obscure senior officer, was hastily elevated to the purple, and had little choice but to accept a humiliating peace with Persia; the surrender of all the gains of Constantine, and the return of Armenia to the status of a neutral buffer-state. Making his way back into Roman territory, he desperately tried to shore-up his legitimacy by restoring Christianity to its former primacy, but the peace treaty had wrecked any possibility of being recognised as emperor. Jovian was found poisoned in his tent shortly before reaching Constantinople; probably a suicide. The role of choosing the new emperor fell once again to legions, who elevated the well-respected general Valentinian to the throne. His decision to elevate his brother Valens as co-emperor was hardly remarkably for the times; imperial power-sharing was now a well established practice. Nevertheless, their reign proved in retrospect a milestone in Roman history, for it firmly entrenched an east-west division of the empire as the permanent form of imperial administration; Valentinian would administer the Western Empire, while Valens took the Eastern Empire. Hereafter, the empire would only be reunited again once very briefly under Theodosius, and almost inevitably the two halves would gradually begin to inexorably drift apart. The reign of Valens and Valentinian was one of near constant internal revolts and foreign incursions. In the west from 265 AD, the Alemanni again began marauding across the Rhine, which would continue throughout Valentinian’s reign. Meanwhile in 367 AD, the depleted legions of Britannia were almost overwhelmed by a coordinated attack by the Picts in the north, and Franks and Saxons on the southern coast; the Saxons were a tribal group from the Jutland Peninsula (modern day Denmark), and later one of the inheritors of Roman Britannia. Still busy on the Rhine, Valentinian dispatched a trusted general called Theodosius the Elder to Britannia, who after two years managed to restore order on the island. Next in 372 AD, the provinces of Africa revolted after suffering from years of neglect under corrupt officials. Once again Theodosius the Elder was dispatched, and there too eventually restored order. Just as Valentinian dealt with uninterrupted crises in the west, so too did Valens in the east. In 265 AD, a cousin of Julian led a revolted that seized control of Constantinople. Valens was forced to turn his attention from keeping Sassanid Persia at bay, to dealing with the usurper. The revolt lasted 12 months, but enough troops were eventually assembled to deal with it effectively. Thereafter, Valens spent his reign incessantly rushing between the Goths on the lower Danube, and the machinations of Sassanid Persia in the east. He was campaigning in Armenia in 375 AD, when he learned of his brother's death; according to the story Valentinian literally burst a blood vessel while trying to negotiate a peace with a Germanic tribe. He proved the last capable ruler that the Western Empire would have. Valens and Gratian (375-383 AD) In 375 AD, Valentinian’s teenage son Gratian (375-383 AD) succeeded to the Western Empire. While the new imperial arrangement was settling, a storm-cloud was brewing in the Germanic lands; the Huns. The Huns were a confederacy of nomadic tribes originally from the central Asian steppes, part of a long tradition of such people who would impact European history, including the Avars, the Turks, and most famously the Mongols. They were an enemy unlike anything before encountered by the Romans or the Germanic tribes, seeming to have been bred for mounted warfare, using the bow from horseback with devastating effect. As the Huns migrated westward over the Hungarian Plateau, they shifted the balance of power in the region, and displaced Germanic tribes from their homelands. In 376 AD, the Visigoths, the western branch of the Goths, appealed for shelter within Roman territory. The settlement of "barbarian tribes within the empire was far from a new policy, it had been going-on all the way back in the reign of Tiberius (14-37 AD). Over the last century, it had become a frequent imperial policy, as a means to both eliminate a foreign threat and provide new recruits for the legions. In the usual resettlement process, tribes numbered in the thousands, they dispersed to live in small groups, disarmed, and obliged to adhere to Roman law. The settlement of the Visigoth was on a scale that had never seen before; not thousands but 100s of thousands. With the legions on the Danube already undermanned, what began as a controlled resettlement, quickly descended into a massive and mismanaged influx of an entire Visigoth nation. Some 200,000 Germanic men, women and children, living under their own laws and chieftains, within Roman territory. The situation was then exacerbated by unscrupulous local authorities exploiting the Visigoths for profit; selling food at exorbitant prices and even buying children as slaves. With Valens tied down in the east, in 377 AD, the Visigoths revolted and began marauded across Thrace under their chieftain Fritigern. It took some time for Valens to agree an unfavourable peace with Sassanid Persia, and march his legions west. The resulting Battle of Adrianople (378 AD) was an ill-judged affair. Valans appealed to his western colleague for additional legions, but no sooner had they been withdrawn from the Rhine, than they were forced to return to deal with Alemanni incursions. Under pressure from the local populace, Valans determined to face the Visigoths alone. He was then lulled into a false sense of security by poor scouting which underestimated the enemy numbers; the Visigoth cavalry were scattered across the countryside foraging for supplies. At Adrianople, the Visigoth held the Romans long enough for the unaccounted for cavalry to suddenly arrive and blew through the legions; of about 25,000 Romans, two-thirds died in the massacre. Valens himself was lost in the fighting, becoming the second emperor to die in battle following the ignoble example set by Decius. It is difficult to overstate the significance of the Battle of Adrianople. According to the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus, “''No battle in our history except Cannae (216 BC) involved such a massacre''” and many historians since have traced the fall of the Western Roman Empire back to this event. The Visigoths would never be expelled from the Roman Empire, going on to sack Rome in 410 BC, then settle permanently in Aquitaine in south-western Gaul, and eventually become the inheritors of Roman Hispania. Theodosius and Gratian (379-383 AD) With Valen's death, Gratian turned to Rome’s most prominent general, Theodosius, the son of Valentinian's military right-hand-man. Theodosius immediately took charge of the shattered legions of the Eastern Empire. It would take him an entire year to raise and train a new army. Four decades after the effective reign of Constantine the Great, the political, economic and social bonds of the Roman Empire were degrading again, as they had during the Crisis of the 3rd-Century. And it was effecting recruitment for the legions which was becoming increasingly difficult. Many large landowners and cities of the empire were establishing themselves as almost self-sufficient fiefdoms, in an attempt to avoid the ever increasing taxes. They were thus naturally reluctant to lose their young workers to the legions. Parallel with this went a languishing of trade. With Romans reluctant to join the legions, resettled Germans become ever more important as a recruiting ground; this Germanisation of the legions would only accelerate over the coming years. Meanwhile, once Theodosius had his army was ready, he was shrewd enough not to risk them in a direct confrontation with the marauding Visigoths. Instead, he adapted an attritional strategy that eventually succeeded in forcing the Goths into an uneasy peace. At this time in the Western Empire, although Gratian was now in his mid-thirties, he was still a weak and ineffectual leader. In 383 AD, a revolt erupted in Britannia, under the capable general Magnus Maximus. He was soon proclaimed emperor by Britannia, Gaul, and Hispania, and it was not long before Gratian was betrayed to Maximus and executed. Theodosius and Valentinian II (383-392 AD) Maximus desperately sought to be officially recognised as emperor of the Western Empire, but Theodosius had his own dynastic ambitions, naming instead his own teenage son Valentinian II. Nevertheless, for four years Valentinian was recognised as Western emperor only in Italy. It was not until 387 AD that Theodosius finally had a free hand to deal with Maximus, after settling things with Sassanid Persia, a peace agreement that as it turned out would endured for over a century. Maximus was decisively defeated at the Battle of Save (388 AD), and died in battle a few months later. Valentinian II was now finally installed as emperor of the Western Empire, but the young man was little more than a figurehead. Instead the trusted general Arbogast acted as the true power behind the throne. The young emperor eventually grew frustrated with his role, with his every order overruled. He even tried dismissing Arbogast from office, but was simply ignored. In 392 AD, young Valentinian committed suicide. Yet another internal strife to the trouble the beleaguered Roman Empire during this time, was between Theodosius and the Christian Church. It was Theodosius who issued the Edict of Thessalonica (380 AD) that made Christianity the official state church of the Roman Empire, but despite this he was rebuked twice during his reign by the St. Ambrose (d. 397); Ambrose was the bishop of Milan and probably the single most influential Church father's of the 4th century. In 388 AD, when Theodosius tried to mildly punish Christians for burning down a Jewish synagogue, the Church forced him to recant. Then in 390 AD, when the emperor overreacted to a relatively minor civilian riots against the legions in the Greek city of Thessalonica, the Church forced him to make a public and humiliating penance. This showdown was reminiscent of nothing more that the Investiture Controversy (1076-1122) almost seven centuries later, and was a foreshadow of the protracted power struggle between church and state of the Middle Ages Theodosius and Honorius (393-395 AD) After the death of Valentinian II, the rumour swept the Eastern Empire that the young Western emperor had actually been murdered by Arbogast; most historians accept that it was genuinely a suicide. A tense stalemate ensued, with Theodosius refusing to name an emperor to the Western Empire. After three months, Arbogast tried to break the stalemate by proposing a capable senior bureaucrat as emperor, and asking Theodosius to ratify the appointment; Arbogast himself was unable to assume the role because of his Frankish descent. Instead, Theodosius elevated his own nine year old son Honorius (393-423), and prepared for yet another civil war. He marched west with his legions and an army of allied Visigoths. The armies of Theodosius and Arbogast fought at the Battle of the Frigidus (September 394 AD). The battle was very close-run two-day affair, but in the end Arbogast was defeated. Yet this battle had unforeseen consequences; the casualties were especially heavy among the Visigoths, further stoking their resentment of the Romans. They would extract their revenge sixteen years later. Meanwhile, just six months after the battle, Theodosius himself died of an illness, probably brought on by the exertion of the campaign. Theodosius was an exemplary general and undoubtedly one of the most capable emperors of the late Roman Empire. Nevertheless, he led the empire into two of its most pointless civil wars against able men, simply to place his own ineffectual sons on the throne of the Western Empire. Arcadius and Honorius (395-408 AD) After his death, Theodosius' young sons Honorius (393-423) and Arcadius (395-408 AD) inherited the west and east halves of the Roman Empire; ten and eighteen respectively. Both of these two young men were famous for being extraordinarily weak-willed, and dominated by a revolving door of ambitious advisors, constantly cutting each other’s throats to take their turn as the power behind the throne. Their reign marked the true partition of the Western and Eastern Empires; from this point on they would act less as halves of an empire, and more as rivals. In this, the east had by far the easier task, now that a lasting peace had been reached with Sassanid Persia. It had only one troublesome frontier on the Danube, and this in turn meant that it had a stronger economic engine with Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt largely untroubled by intruders. In contrast, the Western Empire had troublesome frontiers on the Rhine and upper Danube, as well as Frank and Saxon pirates in the English Channel, and the troublesome Moorish tribes of north-western Africa. Adding to its woes, the provinces of Britannia and Africa had long suffered from neglect, and were prone to periodic revolts. Only Hispania could act as the west's insulated economic engine, and that wouldn't last for long. In the year 401 AD, the Western Empire was struck by a new wave of Germanic incursions, when three tribes (the Vandals, Alans and Suevi) crossed the Rhine and marauded across Gaul. With the legions away in Gaul driving them back, the embittered Visigoths under Aleric seized the opportunity for a brief raid into northern Italy. Then in 405 AD, the eastern branch of the Goths, the Ostrogoths, crossed the Danube and again raided Italy; it took twelve month to finally drive them out of the devastated home peninsula. With the legions focused on Italy, the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi again crashed across the Rhine, and this time the barbarians were never turned back. By now Gaul was in uproar, which prompted the senior commander in Britannia to lead almost all his legions across the English Channel. Although the withdrawal in 407 AD was not a formal abandonment of the province of Britannia, it essentially marked the end of Roman Britain. Over the coming centuries, the island would gradually be inherited by Germanic tribes from Jutland (modern day Denmark) Theodosius II and Honorius (408-423 AD) The eastern emperor Arcadius died in 408 AD after an unremarkable reign during which the east remained far more stable. He was succeeded by his seven-year-old son Theodosius II (408-450 AD). His reign was notable for the first construction of the famous Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, which would prove virtually impregnable for over a thousand years, until the Ottoman Turks finally breached them in 1453 with the use of cannons. Meanwhile in the Western Empire, the most prominent imperial advisor throughout Honorius' reign was a capable man called Stilicho of Vandal descent. In one of the recurring turnovers of imperial advisors, Stilicho was arrested and put to death In 408 AD. This was followed by a purge of his allies, that quickly descended into a shocking and indiscriminate massacre of ethnic Germanic families across the Italian peninsula. Unfortunately for the Romans, karma is a bitch. In the aftermath, some 12,000 Goths from the legions fled Italy made for their cousins the Visigoths in Greece. In late 408 AD, Aleric again marched his Visigoths over the Alps into Italy, and made a beeline for Rome. They put siege to Rome with one simply demand; a legally recognised territory of their own within the Roman Empire. Over a protracted period of negotiations, the western imperial court which now resided in Ravenna inexplicably rejected all terms. Finally on 24 August 410 AD, slaves within the city opened a side-gate in the Aurelian Walls, and the great city of Rome was sacked for the first time in 800 years. For three days, the wealth of classical Rome was looted and smashed; the ashes of Augustus, Trajan, and so many other great Roman figures were scattered to the winds of time. Although, Rome was by this time a political backwater, the sack of Rome caused a psychological shockwave that sent the people of the Roman Empire into a sort of confused despair. The city itself would not truly recover until late in the Middle Ages; from a population of over a million at its height, it gradually dwindled to just twenty-thousand. Emperor Honorius did eventually succeed in pushing the Visigoths out of Italy into Gaul, and shore-up the Rhine frontier. Nevertheless, he could do nothing about the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi already within the empire. Their decision to settle in Hispania was devastating for the Western Empire. For the west, the rich province had long been its well-insulated source of tax revenue, and it was quickly becoming financially untenable. In 415 AD, Honorius made the decision that he had failed to make five years earlier, granting the Visigoths what they had long wanted; a legally recognised homeland at Aquitaine in south-western Gaul. In return, the Visigoths agreed to help the Romans evict the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi from Hispania. True to their word, they did lead a successful series of campaigns that essentially eliminated as a threat the Alans, the most powerful of the three tribes. Theodosius II and Valentinian III (423-450 AD) In 423 AD, the western emperor Honorius died, and, after a brief power struggle, was succeeded by his six-year-old nephew Valentinian III (425-455 AD). However, northern Africa refused to acknowledge him and went into open revolted. Under pressured from the Visigoths and sensing an opportunity, the Vandals migrated en-masse from Hispania to north-western Africa. From there, they gradually had conquered the Roman province of Africa including the great port-city of Carthage by 439 AD, and established the Vandal Kingdom (435 AD–534 AD). The Romans citizens of the region seemed to largely welcome their new Vandal rulers; the province had been perpetually mismanaged under the Romans. With their help, the Vandals quickly turned into a naval power in the western Mediterranean, raiding Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. Despite this, the western imperial court had little option but to formally recognise the Vandal Kingdom in 442 AD, in return for continuing the vital grain supply to Italy. Meanwhile, the Eastern Empire had up until now been largely spared the difficulties faced by the West. This was largely due to her greater economic might. Every year Constantinople paid the Huns large sums in tribute to remain on their side of the Danube. In the two generations since their arrival in Europe, these ferocious people had steadily carved-out a large territory stretching from the Alps to the Caspian. However, the status quo was shattered in 434 AD by the rise of a new Hunnic leader with a much more aggressive posture; Attila the Hun (d. 453 AD). One of the first acts of Attila was to double the annual tribute from the Eastern Empire. The emperor agreed, and he was good to his word, leaving the Eastern Empire alone for the time-being, and turning his attention instead to Sassanid Persia. However, when the Romans were slow to pay in 441 AD, Attila returned and went on a rampage of destruction south of the Danube. What shocked the eastern imperial court the most was that the Huns sacked numerous important fortified cities with siege-craft, something none of the other barbarian tribes had been capable of. The result was a new agreement in 443 AD, involving the payment of all arrears and another doubling of the annual tribute. The humiliated eastern imperial court spent the next four years reinforcing the defences along the Danube, but it mattered little to the Huns. When the Romans tried to cut-off the tribute in 447 AD, Attila once again rode south into the Eastern Empire, sweeping away the defences with ease, and marauding as far as the hinterland of Constantinople itself. The Huns were turned back by the mighty Theodosian Walls, but nothing else seemed to stop them. Thus, the eastern imperial court had to yet again double the annual stipend. Marcian and Valentinian III (450-455) As yet Attila had not invaded the Western Empire, but he was supposedly provided in 450 AD with an interesting pretext. According to the story, he received a marriage proposal from Honoria, the sister of the western emperor Valentinian III, who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, begged Attila to rescue her from this fate. He accepted, and demanded half the Western Empire as her dowry. Whatever the truth behind this story, it was little more than a pretext; Constantinople was a compliant cash-cow, and the west provided opportunity for expansion. By the mid-5th century, the Western Empire was tottering with its frontiers neglected, and Gaul had gradually become a tapestry of Germanic tribes nominally allied to the emperor of the west. Visigoths were established in Aquitaine in the south-west, Franks settled in the north-west, and Burgundians and other tribes west of the Rhine. Yet as Attila rode west, Flavius Aetius, the greatest Roman general of his day, managed to form a coalition of all the people of Gaul to defend their own homeland. The Huns were first turned back near Orléans, then fought to a stalemate at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (June 451 AD), and with his supply-lines overextended Attila withdrew from Gaul. Although the Huns had at no point been defeated, their aura of invincibility was shattered. The next year, Attila took his revenge invading northern Italy, and sacking many cities, including Aquileia which was razed to the ground and Milan one of the richest city in the western empire. Without the support of the tribes of Gaul, Aetius could only run a guerilla campaign against the Huns. Eventually an outbreak of plague and possible a bride persuaded Attila to withdraw, a happy conclusion often credited in Christian propaganda to the pleas of Pope Leo the Great to spare the Holy City. Attila never returned to the Western Empire, dying just 6 months later. The traditional account says the conqueror choked to death in a drunken stupor while celebrating his latest marriage; probably untrue since a remarkably similar story was told about Alexander the Great, who almost certainly died of a fever. Nevertheless, his death marked the end of the Hunnic threat, with quarrels among Attila's great man sons dissipating the empire of the Huns; by the end of the century they had effectively faded from history. Despite Aetius almost single-handedly saving both Gaul and Italy from the Huns, Valentinian III soon grew jealous of the great general and personally stabbed him to death in 454 AD. With a year, the western emperor was himself assassinated by supporters of the dead general. Marcian and Petronius Maximus (455) Petronius Maximus (455), the wealthy senator who had been behind the assassination of Valentinian III, subsequently managed bribed his way to the throne of the Western Empire. In order shore-up his legitimacy, Maximus himself married the former emperor's widow and had his son marry his daughter. However, this meant cancelling an existing betrothal between the young woman and the heir to the Vandal Kingdom. The response of the Vandal King Genseric (d. 477 AD) was immediate and devastating; an invasion force sailed for Italy. Appeals to the Germanic tribes of Gaul again proved fruitless, and Rome was left effectively defenceless. So Maximus attempted to flee the city. However, in the panic, his bodyguard left the western emperor to fend for himself, and he was set upon by an angry mob and stoned to death. The Vandals met no resistance on entering Rome, and over the next two weeks virtually stripped the city bare. Today the term "vandalism" is used to describe any act of mindless destructiveness. After the two month reign of Petronius Maximus, the few remaining western emperors were truly mere puppets. Last Emperors of the Western Empire (455-476) The year 457 AD brought new emperors in both the Eastern and Western Empires. In the east, an extended power struggle following the death of the utterly forgettable Marcian, saw Leo I (457-474 AD) emerge as emperor, the first of a series of capable rulers who would oversee the survival of the Eastern Empire. Meanwhile in the west, when Petronius Maximus died there was another protracted power struggle between the senior generals of Gaul and Italy. Eventually, Majorian (457-461 AD) was raised to the western throne, the puppet of Ricimer the Germanic general of Italy. The ultimate result was the loss of the Western Empire outside the home peninsula. The Germanic tribes of Gaul refused to recognise Majorian, and became entirely independent of Rome, seizing the territory for themselves and aggressively resisting efforts to reassert control. One of the few exceptions was the rump state of Soissons (457–486 AD) in northern Gaul, under the Roman general Syagrius. Meanwhile, Hispania was gradually being taken-over by the Visigoths, extending their territory south from Aquitaine. Ricimer exercised political control of what remained of the Western Empire through a series of puppet emperors. He soon fell-out with Majorian, and had him executed and replaced by another puppet, the senator Libius Severus (461-465 AD). Then when Libius Severus died, not only did no one notice, but Ricimer didn’t name a successor; seemingly testing the waters for ascending to the throne himself, despite his Germanic descent. Meanwhile by 467 AD, the pirates from the Vandal Kingdom were extending their activities as far east as Greece. With this threat to the Eastern Empire, Leo I finally stepped-in, and named a successor as emperor of the west, the successful general Anthemius (467-472 AD). The intention was for Italy to provide support for a major campaign to drive the Vandals out of north Africa, and indeed Anthemius and Ricimer did manage to establish an uneasy alliance for the moment. In 468 AD, a Roman armada of 1,113 ships sailed west, having been assembled at vast expense by the Eastern Empire. At the Battle of Cap Bon (468 AD), Carthage was successfully besieged, but a landing was attempted, the Roman fleet was thrown into disarray by a Vandal fireship attack. Some six hundred ships were lost, and the rest driven off. This fiasco left the Eastern Empire on the verge of bankruptcy, and helpless as the Western Roman Empire finally blinked out of existence with little more than a whimper. By 472 AD, Ricimer finally had had enough of his uneasy alliance with Anthemius, and had him executed. However, just one month later Ricimer himself was dead of an illness. The last few years of the Western Empire were marked by an internal struggle for dominance between Germanic generals, while a series of short-lived puppet emperors sat on the throne. Odoacer eventually emerged victorious in 475 AD during the reign of Romulus Augustulus (475-476 AD). Odoacer then marched on Ravenna, and compelled the young emperor to abdicate on 4 September 476 AD. He then collected up the imperial regalia and sent it to the eastern emperor Zeno (474-491 AD), as a clear message that there was no longer any need for a western emperor. The Kingdom in Italy (476–493) was now an independent nation, and it was for the inheritors of the Roman Empire to determine the future. Category:Historical Periods